So one thing I really love in regards to languages is morphology, the way in which words are made. It's a pretty broad topic in terms of what it consists of, but things like "Can you compound two words to make a new word?" and "What are valid combinations of letters and sounds for a new word?" play into it. I've decided to spend some time looking at that aspect of Mando'a for fun, and to show what I've come up with or what I'm working on.

Right now I'm working on figuring out the canonically valid vowel-consonant strings. So the word "solus" is a string of a "cvcvc" pattern, for example. But "chaab" is a pattern of "cvvc" (or "cvc"). The first step in this is getting all the words into groups based on word length so when I start jotting down the strings I'll be able to sort through the things easier, so that cutting out repeats is easier for me. I'm about halfway through that. Then after that I'll take a look at the combinations in which sounds appear and jot down all the valid digraphs and trigraphs, be they diphthongs/triphongs or consonant clusters. The positions of the digraphs and trigraphs needs to be marked down too. Things like this provide the rules for which new roots can be made, or how words need to be shifted sound wise when combined or altered in some fashion. It's why you don't see a bunch of native English words starting with "vl", for example. Natively that isn't a valid initial cluster and we don't seem keen on making it one.

Some neat things I've found so far is that there's a LOT of five letter words. While I have plenty of four, six, and seven letter long words five seems to be the most common word length in terms of letters. I'll want to break these down into syllables too at some point, mostly just for fun. Along with being broken down by phoneme number, that is the distinct amount of sounds in a word. "Chaab" is five letters long, but it's only four phonemes long. That is "ch", "a", "a", and "b". And if you don't want to include short vs. long vowel distinction then it would only be three phonemes long.

I'm not really sure what could be done with any of this. But it is fun.

I'll also want to look at other bits of how words are formed in detail too. Specifically the ways in which new words are formed based off pre-existing roots. Though so far, without really digging into things and just based off my experience, one of the main ways in which they're constructed is to compound roots together. Adding on of prepositions and affixes is another way in which many words are formed. "Ba'gedet'ye" also provides an example of what may be a dative construction, as seen in languages like Finnish.

EDIT: The list of words by letter lengths is done. Words range from 1 to 12 letters long. 5, 6, and 7 letter long words appear to be the most common. 1, 2, 11, and 12 seem to be the least common lengths. I'll bother with numbers later. Next step is working through the vowel-consonant strings. The list contains the affixes so far, but those will be removed as they aren't free morphemes.

Yay others are intrigued. I'm sorry I haven't gotten the vowel-consonant strings up. School and then getting sick has kind of gotten in the way. Only two more sets of words to get through though and I can type the thing up.

Alright. I have finally gone through the whole list. I've done my best to ensure that there are no repeats, but I'll have to go through this again to make sure because I know for a fact that there are still some there. Somewhere. But for now here is the list (which will probably need to be edited).